Performing emotions

Peta Tait's central argument is that performing emotions in realism is also performing gender identity. This study integrates scholarship on realist drama, theatre and approaches to acting, with interdisciplinary theories of emotion, phenomenology and gender theory. With chapters devoted to masculinity and femininity specifically, as well as to emotions generally, it investigates social beliefs about emotions through Chekhov's four major plays in translation, and English language commentaries on Constantin Stanislavski's direction (of the plays first productions) and his approaches to acting, and Olga Knipper's acting of the central women characters. Tait demonstrates how theatrical emotions are predicated on embodied social performances and create cultural spaces of emotions.